Have you been in a bookstore lately? I don’t tend to go to bookstores much anymore, but the last time I was in there, a few weeks ago, one thing in particular struck me: The self-help book section has gotten enormous! “Get up and go get ‘em” self-help books, quasi-spiritual meditation self-help books, simplistic self-help books, all stacked up nicely in rows. To what end?
If these books actually worked, if two or three of them could help us solve our problems and improve our lives, then why are there so many self-help books in the stores? Something is wrong here. It’s obvious that people are searching for something and they are not finding it. I see people going home with more and more books all the time, but they’re not getting anywhere in their lives!
The reason? Lack of integration. Years ago, I was into all sorts of books: Ancient Greek books, Chinese books, self-improvement books and plenty more. But those books did not make my life any better. The truth is that for many people, books are nothing more than empty hope. Every time they buy a new one, they think they’ll get rid of their anxiety, pick up more women or men, or learn how to get rich. But it never works out. So… What to do?
The solution is to adopt a more practical approach. After learning a new idea or concept, we have to integrate it into our being: Into our minds, our bodies, our breathing, our thought-patterns. We have to become that new approach in order to really understand it. This is what I did a few years ago and it has worked wonders for my life.
The method is to select one or two concepts and no more. Then, think how we can integrate the new ideas into our selves, now.
Take two months, if you have to, but work on it and actually do it. It’s better to take one self-help book and actually do what it says, to really see if the ideas in it work, than to sit there reading book after book, hoping that the next one will change your life. It won’t. Books don’t change us, we change ourselves.
As human beings, we must transform ourselves in order to get somewhere. It’s that simple. And self-transformation takes time and practice. Creating new mental habits and new behaviors requires repetition.
We must be willing to do something and also be willing to accept temporary failures.
The worst mistake I see people make, and one that I often used to make myself, is attempting to create personal change merely by thinking. This never seems to work. The human biology is complex: Thoughts, emotions, body sensations, tension, nerve impulses, biophysical energy flow, etc… All of these factors are constantly interacting within us, in a complex balance of order and chaos.
Can we think our way out of anxiety? Can we reason our way out of depression? Can we learn how to attract the opposite sex simply by reading a book? No!
Sure, thinking can help. Eliminating false and negative beliefs, for example, is a great start to self-improvement. But that alone won’t do the job. The fact remains that we have to take our bodies with us. Thinking is not enough. We have to actually create changes in our physical and energetic body in order to make new concepts stick. The changes have to become a part of us.
Here’s a practical little exercise to try.
Choose a quiet spot where you can be alone. Sit comfortably. Take 15 to 20 very deep breaths, exhaling fully each time. Keep breathing deeply until you notice a change in the way you feel. Clear your mind as much as possible. Then, imagine either:
1. A situation in life that regularly causes you stress and one that you constantly mishandle.
or
2. A situation that you know you will have to deal with in the future that makes you feel fear or apprehension in the present.
Make sure you keep breathing deeply from your belly. As images of this hypothetical situation enter your mind, notice when something negative comes up. When it does, change the movie in your mind by interjecting an image into it. After all, the mental video in your mind is a representation and nothing more.
Sometimes I like to imagine a crude joke from the South Park cartoon series and the image of Cartman entering into the mental movie. Often, I feel slightly better right away. Why? It’s not easy to stay serious when, while imagining something bad, Eric Cartman comes onto the scene, flatuating and being an egoistic jerk, as he often is.
Suppose that I am imagining a difficult public presentation that I have to give – imagining the joke disrupts the negative emotions associated with those imagined experiences. It interrupts the patterns I’ve created in my mind and emotions and their effects on my physiology.
You can repeat this exercise over and over, and you will get better at changing your mental images over time. You can perfect the process by choosing which images to interject and learning how to play around with your imagination. After all, a lot of what causes us stress is actually worrying about possible or hypothetical future situations, or reliving negative events from the past. The more you play around with the images you place into your own mind, the more skillful you will become at changing how you feel.
And that’s what most of us are looking for in our lives. Ways to feel better. Better emotions, less anxiety, less restlessness, more inner peace.
The purpose of the exercise is to work it into your daily routine and improve bit by bit, every day. When you get a chance to be alone, practice this little exercise. Then, when you enter the “real world” and the situation has to be experienced again, you should integrate the idea you’ve practiced in your imagination.
The applications of this one little tactic are endless. Men who are shy with women can play around with situations in their imaginations and change their internal dialogue into something less negative. Then, they can go out and practice in real situations, they can talk to women and make small improvements.
This concept can apply to social phobias, anxiety, depression, aversion to publilc speaking and many other common challenges people are faced with.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned on my journey of self-improvement, it’s that tiny steps and consistent application and integration is the only strategy that consistently improves my life.
So, choose one thing and implement it. And be consistent about it. It’s a lot better than grasping for change by buying self-help books that you’ll never actually make good use of.
Believe me, I tried both avenues, and only the path of action worked.